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“How did you know there would be a fog?” she whispered to Altan.
“There’s a fog every time it rains. This is the wet cycle for the rice paddies. Qara’s birds have been keeping track of cloud movements for the past week,” Altan said. “We know the marsh inside out.”
Altan’s attention to detail was remarkable. The Cike operated with a system of signals and cues that Rin would never have been able to decipher had she not been drilled relentlessly the day before. When Qara’s falcon flew overhead, that had been the signal for Aratsha to begin his subtle manipulation of the river currents. Half an hour before that, an owl had flown low over the river, signaling Baji and Suni to ingest a handful of colorful fungi. The drug’s reaction time was timed precisely to the estimated arrival of the fleet.
Amateurs obsess over strategy, Irjah had once told their class. Professionals obsess over logistics.
Rin had choked down a bagful of poppy seeds when she saw Qara’s first signal; they stuck thickly to her throat, settled lightly in her stomach. She felt the effects when she stood; she was just high enough that her head felt light but not so woozy that she couldn’t wield a sword.
Altan had ingested nothing. Altan, for some reason, did not seem to need any drugs to summon the Phoenix. He called the fire as casually as one might whistle. It was an extension of him that he could manipulate with no concentration at all.
A faint rustle overhead. Rin could barely make out the silhouette of Qara’s eagle, passing over for the second time to alert them to the arrival of the Federation. She heard a gentle sloshing noise coming from the channel.
Rin squinted at the river and saw not a fleet of boats but a line of Federation soldiers, implausibly walking in the river that reached up to their shoulders. They carried wooden planks high over their heads.
She realized that they were engineers. They were going to use those planks to create bridges for the incoming fleet to roll supplies onto dry land. Smart, she thought. The engineers each held a waterproof lamp high over the murky channel, casting an eerie glow over the canal.
Altan motioned for Suni and Baji to crouch deeper to the ground so they wouldn’t be visible over the reeds. The long grass tickled Rin’s earlobes, but she didn’t move.
Then, far down by the mouth of the channel, Rin saw the dim flicker of a lantern signal. At first she could see only the boat at the fore.
Then the full fleet emerged from the mist.
Rin counted under her breath. The fleet was twelve boats—sleek, well-constructed river sampans—packed with eight men each, sitting in a straight line with trunks of equipment stacked in high piles at the center of each boat.
The fleet paused at a fork in the river. The Federation had two choices; one channel took them to a wide bay where they could unload with relative ease, and the other took them on a detour into the salt marsh labyrinth where the Cike lay in waiting.
The Cike needed to force the fleet to the left.
Altan lifted an arm and flicked his hand out as if releasing a whip. Tendrils of flame licked out from his hands, streaking in either direction like glowing snakes. Rin heard a short sizzling noise as the flame raced through the reeds.
Then, with a high-pitched whistling noise, the first of Ramsa’s rockets erupted into the night sky.
Ramsa had rigged the marsh so that each rocket’s ignition would light the next sequentially, granting several seconds of delay between explosions. They set the marsh ablaze with a horrifically pungent stink that overwhelmed even the sulfurous odor of the peat.
“Tiger’s tits,” Altan muttered. “He wasn’t joking about the feces.”
The explosions continued, a chain reaction of fire powder to simulate the noise and devastation of an army that didn’t exist. Bamboo bombs at the far end of the river erupted with what sounded like thunderclaps. A succession of smaller fire rockets exploded with resonant booms and enormous pillars of smoke; these did not catch fire, but served to confuse the Federation soldiers and obstruct their vision, so their boats could not see where they were going.
The explosions goaded the Federation soldiers directly into the dead zone created by Aratsha. When the first flare went up, the Federation boats swerved rapidly away from the source of the explosions. The boats collided with one another, snarled together and crammed in the narrow creek as the fleet moved clumsily forward. The tall rice fields, unharvested since the siege had begun, forced the boats to clump together.
Realizing his mistake, the Federation captain ordered his men to reverse direction, but panicked shouts echoed across the boats as the ships realized they could not move.
The Federation was locked in.
Time for the real attack.
As fire rockets continued to shoot toward the Federation fleet, a series of flaming arrows screamed through the night sky and thudded into the cargo trunks. The volley of arrows came so rapidly that it seemed as if an entire squadron were concealed in the marshes, firing from different directions, but Rin knew that it was only Qara, safely ensconced on the opposite bank, firing with the blinding speed of a trained huntress from the Hinterlands.
Next Qara took out the engineers. She punctured the forehead of every other man, tidily collapsing the man-made bridge with a surreal neatness.
Assaulted from all sides by enemy fire, the Federation fleet began to burn.
The Federation soldiers abandoned their flaming boats in a panic. They leaped for the bank, only to be bogged down in the muddy marsh. Men slipped and fell in paddy water that came up to their waists, filling up their heavy armor. Then, at a whisper from Altan, the reeds along the shore also burst into flame, surrounding the Federation like a death trap.
Even so, some made it to the opposite bank. A throng of soldiers—ten, twenty—clambered onto dry land—only to run into Suni and Baji.
Rin wondered how Suni and Baji intended to hold the entire strip of peat alone. They were only two, and from what she knew of their shamanic abilities, they couldn’t control a far-ranging element the way Altan or Aratsha could. Surely they were outnumbered.
She shouldn’t have worried.
They barreled through the soldiers like boulders crashing through a wheat field.
In the dim light of Ramsa’s flares, Suni and Baji were a flurry of motion that evoked the flashing combat of a shadow puppetry show.
They were so much the opposite of Altan. Altan fought with the practiced grace of a martial artist. Altan moved like a ribbon of smoke, like a dancer. But Baji and Suni were a study in brutality, paragons of sheer and untempered force. They utilized none of the economical forms of Seejin. Their only guiding principle was to smash everything in their vicinity—which they did with abandon, knocking men back off the shore as quickly as they clambered on.
A Sinegard-trained martial artist was worth four Militia men. But Suni and Baji were each worth at least ten.
Baji cut through bodies like a canteen cook chopping through vegetables. His absurd nine-pointed rake, unwieldy in the hands of any other soldier, became a death machine in Baji’s grip. He snagged sword blades between the nine prongs, locking three or four blades together before wrenching them out of his opponents’ grasps.
His god had given him no apparent transformations, but he fought with a berserker’s rage, truly a wild boar in a bloodthirsty frenzy.
Suni fought with no weapon at all. Already massive, he seemed to have grown to the size of a small giant, stretching up to well over ten feet. It shouldn’t have been possible for Suni to disarm men with steel swords as he did, but he was simply so terribly strong that his opponents were like children in comparison.
